Attention: this blog is not a real blog!
It’s one part explanation of why there’s been nothing for such a long time, one
part description of what is to come, and one part rumination on things that
have been happening lately.
For those of you who don’t know, I also
write fiction sometimes, but not very much because it’s difficult and I’m lazy
about it. About once or twice a year I have an idea that I think is worthy of
working out on paper, and a few weeks ago I got one of them in the night, just
as I was falling asleep. The feeling of having a really exciting story occur to
me out of nowhere is one of the purest joys I’ve experienced. This one came to
me with lots of that excitement (which pretty much all my ideas have, at least
at the beginning) but also with a complete plot and ending (which almost none
of them do). It’s loosely based on a character arch from one of the many partly
written novels I started and eventually gave up on in high school. I figured
out all at once that it could work as a short story, with details that I’m
better equipped to create now that I’m an adult with some life experience
behind me. So I’ve been working on that, and since I’ve been writing it fairly
quickly, I kept thinking it was almost done when it really wasn’t. In fact, now
that I’ve just got the final, most important scenes left to write, I’ve
realized that it’s actually a lot more complicated and tricky to pull than I
thought at the beginning, and it might take some time/not work out at all.
The
story deals with street harassment, trauma, and the ways people think and talk
about beauty. Shortly after I started writing it, a young man in California
killed his three roommates and three women to fulfill his insane vendetta
against every woman who never had sex with him (i.e. all women). It hit me very
hard that he actually got what he wanted, albeit on a smaller scale, and that
everyone was going to remember his name and forget anything meaningful about
the people he killed. A few days after that, a woman from my work was murdered on her way home at night. And this felt even worse, in a way, because it just made no sense: the man who killed her
didn’t know her, it didn’t appear to be premeditated, he just saw her at her
bus stop and took her and now she’s gone from the world.
It’s
the kind of killing that you think doesn’t happen so close to you, but of
course it does, and when it does you remember that even though you live in a
first world country, in a nice area, even if it’s not that late at night and
your bus stop is only 500 meters from your house, you could one day just be murdered.
So
I’ve been thinking about all of that while writing, and about all the
obscenities that have ever been called out at me while I was alone and vulnerable,
and the times it just irritated me and the times I was really afraid. I think
that the story might be important because it has some things to say about that.
However,
it also deals with specific kinds of trauma that I thankfully haven’t experienced,
and that makes me nervous. It makes me worried that I’m not going to do justice
to the real, lived experiences of real people who might read it, and that I
might hurt them all over again. I worry that I might be doing it wrong or for
the wrong reasons. I think I have to write the rest of the story and figure out
whether it’s good and risky, or just okay and risky, or actually not that good
at all. So no promises just yet.
I think
traumatic experiences tend to be easier to write about because it’s easier to
get a draw a kind of beauty out of misery than out of happiness. It’s hard to
write happy stories that aren’t just cheesy or bland. But after a few years of
writing some fairly dark stories, I’ve decided that it isn’t enough for
something to just be dark – it has to be dark with a purpose, and ideally with
some hope in there as well. And it should be artfully done, because there is no
point in putting negative things into the world if it isn’t art.
And besides all
of that, when you’re writing about things that you haven’t specifically
experienced, it comes with a set of responsibilities to the people who have.
It’s about finding the line between exploring and exploiting trauma. I want to
make sure I’m on the right side of it.
On that topic,
my good friend Tom Augustine is fundraising this week for a short film he’ll be
shooting in July. It’s called Long Time Coming, and it deals with misogyny and
violence. I’ve read the script and I think it’s going to be a very important
contribution to the discussion New Zealand’s been having on-and-off since the
Roast Busters scandal came out last year. Tom’s been working very hard to stay
on the right side of the exploration/exploitation scale, and I encourage all of
you to have a look at his PledgeMe here and consider contributing if you can.
Anyway,
alongside the story, this week I’m going to be working on an illustrated piece
about something quite different. So all going well, you can expect a blog of
substance within a week. Best wishes everyone. xx
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